My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Roux
The next Mardi Gras fell on a warm Tuesday, and the camp house kitchen was full of people.
It had been a year and a few days since the pasture.
The old man with the cane sat at the head of the cypress table with a cup of coffee, telling the foreman a story about a horse.
Two more of the twelve had come with their wives.
One had brought a pot of boudin, and one a pecan pie, and the priest, who had a standing invitation now, had brought a bottle of something amber and was not saying what it was.
The back door stood open on the porch and the lake.
The tub still sat at the end of it, clean, with a pot of geraniums in it.
I stood at my stove in my mother's apron.
Margot stood on a kitchen chair beside me in a red apron of her own, with her braids pinned up and her sleeves pushed past her elbows.
She would be seven in a week, and she had not stopped talking in fourteen months.
"Mama," she said.
She said it the way she said everything now, plainly, as a thing that was true.
"Yes, mon coeur?" I said.
"Can I make the roux?"
I looked down at her.
She had said Mama on a Tuesday in January about a heron, and then not again for nine days.
On the tenth day she had said it at breakfast, with a spoon in her hand, and gone on eating her cereal.
She said it now a hundred times a day.
I had stopped catching my breath.
Almost.
"It takes forty minutes," I said.
"I can wait."
"You can't leave it.
"Not once.
"If you look away, it burns, and you have to start over."
"Why?" Margot asked.
"Because that's what roux is," I said.
"I'm not going to leave," Margot said.
I set the heavy black pot on the burner.
It was my mother's cast-iron pot, thirty years of seasoning in it, and my grandmother's before that.
I measured the oil and the flour into it with my own hands, and I put the long wooden spoon into hers.
"Both hands," I said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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